Built by
one person
on purpose.

OriginBuilt from a problem I had

I'm Josh Torrent. I've spent the last decade inside the music industry — managing artists, building small tools nobody asked me to build, mostly working alone.

Three years of Instagram DMs had piled up : bookers, promoters, label folks, fellow producers, journalists. Real conversations with real opportunities, buried under reposts and forgotten threads. Instagram's search couldn't find them. Scrolling through hundreds of conversations didn't help. The data existed. I just couldn't see it.

I started by hand-rolling a structured contact list in Notion — every booker, every promoter, every collab pitch sorted by zone, role, conversation state. That single table changed how I worked. It's how I built international tour routes — India, Australia, Japan, South-East Asia, the US. Not by guessing who to email, but by actually seeing who I'd already talked to in each region and where each conversation had stopped.

So I exported my archive, wrote the parser I wished existed, and ran it. 774 conversations, 591 qualified contacts, 104 lost ones recovered. Then I built a custom dashboard around the output — filterable by function and signal, AI-summarized, tied to the user's email — so other solo artists wouldn't have to rebuild the wheel in Notion. That's Backline.

SoloNo team, no funding, no SaaS bloat

Backline is run by me, alone. No co-founders, no employees, no investors expecting a 10× return in 18 months. There's no Series A roadmap, no land-grab, no "we're hiring" page hidden behind the marketing copy.

Pricing reflects that. One-time payments only. Free tier for the first 20 contacts. €99 for one full run on our managed key. €79 for bring-your-own-key if you'd rather use your own Anthropic API key. No subscription on any tier.

That makes Backline a lifestyle business by design, not a startup. The target is sustainability — covering the API costs, paying for my time honestly, and staying small enough to keep moving.

StanceYour data stays yours

Privacy is structural, not marketing copy. Your archive is uploaded over an encrypted connection, only message text is processed (attachments, photos and voice notes are never extracted), and the results are visible only to you — never sold, shared, or used to train anything. Prefer zero upload? A browser-only mode parses everything locally on your device.

The only thing that transits is the parsed text of each conversation, sent to Anthropic's Claude API to write the AI summaries — proxied through our Cloudflare Worker so the API key stays server-side. Anthropic doesn't train on API traffic and retains inputs for up to 30 days for safety monitoring, then deletes them. We don't use your conversations for anything else.

The sorted contact list lives in your private dashboard, tied to your email. Only you see it when signed in. Export to CSV anytime, or wipe everything in one click from your account page. We never sell, share, or train on your data. Full breakdown on the privacy page.

ReachHow to actually contact me

Email is the only support channel: [email protected]. Replies come from me. There's no ticket queue, no help-desk software, no chatbot.

If you're a music professional with a use case I haven't thought of — bigger archives, multi-account export, Telegram or WhatsApp parsing — I want to hear it. The roadmap is shaped by actual users, not pitch decks.